ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter we demonstrated that sign languages have the means to combine and recombine meaningless primitives to make new words, leading to a potentially rich lexicon. But are sign language lexicons really rich in their expressive power? To pose this question, we really must ask another question first: How is richness measured in a language? Most people probably assume that it is measured in terms of vocabulary size. English is often considered to be a very rich language because English dictionaries contain a large number of entries. The largest English dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, contains about 400,000 entries. We might compare this with a current, comprehensive Hebrew dictionary, the Sapir Dictionary, which contains only about half that number, 220,000. Why the gap?
